review for Invisible Invaders on AllMovie

Invisible Invaders is one of those movies that critics at the time of its release loved to abuse and deride. Afficianados of science fiction and horror cinema, however, recognized it as an interesting idea for a movie, executed not badly within the context of its time. The idea of invisible aliens was a cost-saving measure that went back at least as far as W. Lee Wilder's Phantom From Space, but in place of hideous aliens, which the makers couldn't afford, the producers gave us the image of decaying corpses rising out of graves and attacking the living. This was a notion lifted right out of Edward D. Wood Jr.'s Plan 9 From Outer Space, but it is executed somewhat better here, if not as entertainingly. Edward L. Cahn's movie is actually a little bit closer in content and spirit to George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, which it anticipated by eight years. And the performances are decent, if at times a bit over the top, while the effects are acceptable within the boundaries of low-budget filmmaking. Invisible Invaders was one of a quartet of sci-fi horror films made by director Cahn and producer Robert E. Kent (the others were It! The Terror From Beyond Space, Curse of the Faceless Man, and The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake) that had a long shelf life on television and a lot of influence on the taste of genre movie buffs, far beyond what any established movie critic of the era would have recognized. And along with It! The Terror From Beyond Space (which became the inspiration for Alien), it was one of two movies by the director that manifested its influence indirectly on horror cinema of the decades that followed.